Wednesday, November 25, 2009

It’s been a little while since my last post; well … there’s a wonderful reason for that: last week my first son was born! So, I had little-to-none time left for blogging.

Ok, down to business now …

In the past few weeks you may have heard and or witnessed that a new update for the XBox 360 was recently released, bringing a bunch of new exciting features like Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm support.

You may have also heard that Microsoft banned unofficial memory units.

Well, that is not what I’m going to blog about today!

There is one more thing you may have heard (and I hope you haven’t experienced yourself): MSFT has banned a plethora of (modified) consoles (the buzz is that the number of bans is close to one million consoles).

The reason? Simple: fighting against piracy.

Thus, if -for whatever reason- you hacked the disc drive, installed unauthorized software, created a modded version of the console, and –maybe in some cases- repaired it yourself from the RROD with a custom solution, then you are likely to lay within the unlucky number!

What does a banned 360 mean? Simply put: the XBox Live service is not available any longer to that console. The owner can still play offline, but forget about Arcade and Indie games.

And since the gamertag/account is not banned, just the console, that gamer can purchase a new console to regain access to those channels. What brings me to the main topic of this post:

WATCH OUT THE XBOX 360 CONSOLE YOU BUY!!!

As a result of the massive banning process, many owners of banned 360s are trying to sell those consoles through popular online auction sites, claiming that they never experienced technical problems, offering a bunch of (pirated) games, and not even mentioning that console is “modded” in the first place.

Always remember: the ban is on the console itself, so if you happen to buy a banned 360, it doesn’t matter that you have a valid gamertag / account, the ban on the console won’t disappear.

So, be careful on the 360 you pick: verify it’s a brand new one on a sealed (never opened) pack before closing any deal.

And don’t install pirate software: is illegal, and eventually -as this wave of bans prove, it turns to be more expensive than doing things right in the first place!